Telling the Bees

Summary

Listen to this Story Narrated by Emily Polk Contributor Bios Writer Emily Polk lives and writes on a small island east of San Francisco and teaches environmental writing at Stanford University. Her writing and radio documentaries have appeared in National Geographic Traveler, The Boston Globe, National Radio Project, Whole Earth Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, and Aeon among others. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book Wild Grief. Bees have long been witness to human grief, carrying messages between the living and the dead. Finding solace in the company of bees, Emily Polk opens to the widening circles of loss around her and an enduring spirit of survival. I drive under the highway overpass at 30th Street, past two women in hijabs walking swiftly, a Chinese man with his bike waiting at a bus stop, an “Exotic Market” promising cheap groceries. Boarded storefronts tagged in colorful graffiti offer a secret language of urban scars. I pass a caravan of rusted school buses and flat-tired RVs occupied by old men wearing the skin of the city on their faces, and park next to a blue tent that smells like piss and wild sage pitched in the middle of a sidewalk. In this city of beauty and rubble, where everything good and everything bad about it is true and sometimes at the same time, I am looking for a famous beekeeper from Yemen. I make my way toward “Bee Healthy Honey Shop,” where just beyond the front window, makeshift shelves in the shape of wooden hives hold beeswax candles, soap, and jars of honey. On the side of the store, a mural titled “Happbee place” shows a painted beekeeper kneeling next to colorful hive boxes. Muslim prayers spill out the front door and into the street. The shop is a sanctuary where everybody prays to the bees—with good reason. The oldest bee fossil dates back more than a hundred million years. These little creatures were flying under the noses of dinosaurs while humans were still stardust. Today there are more than twenty thousand known...